Raffles Country Club in Jurong to be handed over to government soon

The High Speed Rail from Kuala Lumpur to Singapore was quite uncertain, however the government has now acquired the land that you can find the Raffles Country Club (RCC) on right now. According to the government, the Raffles Country Club will be the second one that will be removed in order to bring the High Speed Rail. Other than this, the Cross-Island Line (CRL) is also one of the reasons that the government acquire the RCC. The site will be the depot for the CRL in the west of Singapore.

This RCC is one of the oldest clubs in Singapore and they were actually handed over to the government earlier than expected even though they had a lease to expire in October 2028.

Currently there were some development challenges in Malaysia that basically left the entire project in doubt at least for the time being. The national debt for the country is quite high, so they said they would try to negotiate a rail deferment in order to avoid any compensation payments if the project is scraped for example.

There will be a meeting between the two countries this month to see the future of the project. The club has a temporary license however, and that will expire at the end of January next year. We expect to see some sort of resolution in the end. Most of the facilities, memberships and the general as well as the finance manager will still be a part of the club till January next year. However, there’s not a lot said about the cleaners and frontline staff, it is unknown if they receive any aid in searching for new job opportunities.

According to a member of this club, most people won’t be affected because there are multiple golf clubs to choose from in the area. In the old days the gold memberships were exclusive, now that’s not really the case. So it makes a lot of sense to deal with this sort of thing.

It’s very hard to figure out if the High Speed Rail will have the Dec 31 2026 opening that was initially advertised. It’s still a possibility, but there are some challenges that come from creating this sort of project as you can see here. If the project will be complete, people that travel from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur will be able to do that in just 90 minutes. Which will be an amazing thing for sure. But it’s hard to say when the project will be fully completed!